Cheap and cheerful Arduino breadboard basics

For those less experienced folks looking to move their Arduino projects to more permanent installations, this is just for you! [Martyn] Posted a three part series, VeroBoardUino, over at his blog about moving your Arduino project to a soldered breadboard.

Part one kicks off with the appropriate breadboard requirements, modifications, and a simple 7805 power supply. In the guide [Martyn] is using strip board, so copper connections will have to be broken using a drill or just by scraping with a hobby knife. Strip board also saves a bit of wire routing in the end. Part two handles the reset button, serial connection and chip socket (Part 2.5 has also been added to include schematics of the breadboard). Finally, part three installs the crystal and connects your Atmega chip to power and ground.

Next post he will be covering more on the software end of things, burning the bootloader and uploading programs to your new board so stay tuned for updates!

Hopefully this will lead to more projects being showcased on HaD that aren’t just a “look what I done!” with pre-built Arduinos & shields of some sort, but a thought out board (even stripboard) that contains just the components needed for the projects.

I actually use a variation of this – building to padboard (a variant of veroboard that has no connections between each pad) using 30AWG Kynar wire.

With stripboard you lose a pad each time you make a cut and it is inefficient when there are parallel busses. 3 pieces of 30 gauge Kynar can be ‘threaded’ through one hole and routed around the board and the ends are easy to strip with a good pair of snips and practice.

Normally I first create tracks where it is sensible to do so by soldering a piece of stripped Kynar wire along pads then start ’embroidering’ the rest. This makes for a much higher density than would normally be available.

Obviously crosstalk means this is not good at high frequencies but then neither is breadboard and anything fast enough to cause grief probably shouldn’t be built using pad or stripboard anyway.

The result is surprisingly robust and I have pieces of kit that have boards built this way that are still working years later.

I even prototype this way these days as I hate breadboards. If I end up not using the board then I pull the chips, desolder the sockets (I use turned pin) and keep the boards for robbing of the cheap components if and as I need them. On a few occasions I have even depopulated and cleaned a piece of board to re-use it when I’m out of fresh board.

A lot easier to show than describe so maybe I’ll do a tutorial someday.